Not so long ago, Disney procured Club Penguin - a virtual world for kids between 6 to 14 - for a cool $350 million and the deal also allowed the founders an opportunity to make another $350 million from now till 2009. The website was barely 2 years old when it was procured. At the time of acquisition Club Penguin was raking in about $4 million in monthly revenue just from subscriptions alone. This was excluding the sales from selling virtual goods and other online merchandise.
Soon after news of this phenomenal acquisition break out, many around the world would attempt to follow after the footsteps of the entrepreneurial trio who created Club Penguin and pocketed $100 million each. Two years in exchange for that kind of money isn't exactly shabby!
In the wake of this situation, the questions to answer are:
• Is there a need for another Club Penguin or more Club Penguins for that matter?
• Will Disney break Club Penguin or make it better?
• Can somebody come up with something better than the deceptively simple Club Penguin?
• Even if somebody comes up with something better than Club Penguin, would it be even half as popular as Club Penguin?
• When the market is flooded with dozens of replicas of Club Penguin, would saturation occur or would this spawn more virtual kids?
• How would this shape the landscape of the web community?
• What kind of opportunities do the big venture caps see in virtual worlds for kids?
• Would the big 'G' or any other internet giants see value in the next Club Penguin enough to procure it?
• What kind of social problems can potentially result in the midst of all these?
I believe these are worthy questions to ask yourself if you are interested to create the next virtual world hit for kids.
The world is changing at a neck breaking speed and there are more and more products that are targeted specifically at kids being spawned even as you read this article. Virtual worlds for kids are one of them.
The race is on to create the next Club Penguin!
You can visit the Mediafreaks blog to read up more on gadgets and trends.
This article was written by Aldric Chang - a creative businessman who is active in music composing and production, internet marketing, casual games production, animation production, cartoon production and character licensing. His 3d animation studio - Mediafreaks - is focused on producing high-end animation work for documentary producers, advertising houses and cartoon animated series - with projects ranging from the animation of dinosaurs to the visualization of natural disasters and something as chic as 3d jewelry animations.
